Mostly about games, but with occasional detours into other nerdy territories.

Friday Roundup

Ok, so I’ve been violating the 500 word rule pretty hard this past week. Need to think about that some.

For Friday, I just want to point out a couple of pretty cool or interesting things floating around the web at large.

Chuck Wendig’s Irregular Creatures was a steal at $2.99, but he’s got a sale going to sell it for 99 cents for the next few days. This is a fantastic book – Chuck has a deft hand, and a bucket of talent that runs crazily deep. If you’re unfamiliar with Chuck, he’s the brain behind a lot of great World of Darkness stuff, and he maintains a blog over at Terrible Minds which is somethign that deserves to be on every writer’s reading list (provided they do not mind salty language. When I say Chuck’s blog is kosher, I mean the salt comes in huge chunks but makes everything better).

Couple other gaming blogs have shown up on my radar and I’d like to give them a hat tip. Transneptune Games crossed my radar on one of my rare trips to Story Games, and I think they’ve got a lot of promise. As I understand it they’re a three man team, and they’re rotating through a lot of interesting stuff. Plus, they dig Leverage, so big thumbs up. Also, I was drawn to the d20pro blog by an interesting post on running a city campaign. Reminded me a little bit of one of the weird things I’d written about skill challenges

This week we added Jess Hartley and Sean Nittner to the Evil Hat family, working on our current project. If you do not know why this is awesome then a) you should and b) you will!

You Are Not So Smart is one of my favorite long form blogs on the internet, writing about all the ways in which we delude ourselves. Posts have been less frequent lately (boo!) because there is apparently a book coming (yay!), but the latest post on Deindividuation is something that is useful to anyone who spends time on the Internet and is looking for a deeper explanation of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Peter Bregman may be my favorite business writer out there, primarily because most ofhis business writing is applicable outside of business. His latest piece, Arguing is Pointless, is a great example of this. This is a point that it really took Influencers to drive home for me, but it’s an important one: talking to people is almost useless in changing their existing opinions, and trying to do so ends up pretty much missing the point, as we end up fightng over real estate in each other’s heads rather than the real territory we care about.

If you follow tumblr, I must put in a plug for I Love Charts. Provided you love charts. Which I do.

Dave Gray, the guy behind Gamestorming and all around clever thinker wrote a long piece on the connected company that I’m still digesting. Really interesting, thoughtful stuff about how companies (and by extension groups) really work.